They loaded me up. It felt funny after all the talk of provisions and not needing any.
They filled my rucksack with food and drink. A spare pair of socks. And a book—one of the volumes whose pages looked like hedge mazes.
I took it out of the rucksack, opened it, closed it again. Swept my fingers over the clothbound cover. Soft from handling, from countless hands. Maybe because I wanted it so badly, I found myself offering it back. “You know I can’t read it by myself.”
“Nor should you,” said Viv.
“Have you ever seen any of us studying alone?” said Max. Had his beard filled in more since I’d arrived? The sun caught the marmalade sprawl of it and it looked more like the Captain’s than ever.
“Oh.”
“Go on,” said Dora.
I looked at her. She did a thing with her chin: Go on.
I tucked it back into the rucksack.
We were in the study house. It was morning; we were the only ones there. The room had been swept, the tables wiped down. I could see a few unpopped kernels hiding behind a table leg. A missed book lying upon a bench.
I had on my jacket and the scuffed brown shoes Dora’d given me the first day. “What about my boots?”
“Want them?”
I shook my head.
“Well, then. We’ll put them in the lost and found. Someone else will come along.”
Viv stepped forward. “Here’s this for you.” She lifted something over my head. My body prepared for the weight of a water skin. But what she settled upon me weighed nothing at all. A thin metal chain from which hung a glass charm no bigger than the last joint of my little finger.
“What’s it for?” I touched it. It came to the spot on my chest where I was feeling a pain.
“A keepsake,” she said.
I held it away from me so I could examine it more closely. The glass was in the shape of a bottle, stoppered by a crumb of cork. In the hollow nestled a tiny paper scroll tied with a thread. “What’s it—is it a message?”
“Yes.”
“How will I—” She knew I could not read. “How could anyone—” It was so small.
“This is the message.” She kissed my forehead.
My eyes were swimming. Viv took a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. A bit gruffly, Max said, “Here’s this for you, too,” and handed me the bicycle basket, padded not with grass now but with carded fleece. “For Company.” The kitten was all ready to go; she rode atop the rovings as if seated upon her rightful throne.
“Thank you for making her well,” I told Dora.
“Didn’t really,” she replied, placing a thumb between the kitten’s ears and stroking her one last time.
“Well.” I was the one who said that.
We moved outside.
It was just another leave-taking. What was one more, among so many? First I’d left my father’s house, where I had never belonged. Then the cave, where my mother’s head lay upon a stone. Then the Captain’s, where I’d learned no one’s not broken. Then the Other Side, where I’d found milk and honey. Then Something Happened Here, where I’d felt myself accompanied. Then the tunnel, where I’d made—it was true, why not admit it?—a friend. (Or—because that was not quite right—where I’d encountered someone who might have been a friend in another life, another world, another version of the story.) Now it was time to leave the study house, where a whole dear family had embraced me.
But I was not done. That was the truth of it. I had farther to go.
Max tightened the straps of my rucksack for me. It was funny to think I, who couldn’t read, was carrying not one book now, but two. Three if you counted the tiny scroll around my neck. I touched it, the glass charm. Dora’s eyes shone with damp, and Max put an arm around Viv, and Missy the hen came bustling over, all brown and gold and full of inquisitive jabber, and Viv gave a little laugh, but her nose was bright pink, and the pain in my chest sparked like flint against stone and I had to tell myself, For it is, fortunately, a truly immense journey.